Fed Opens Negative Interest Rate Pandora’s Box: What Happens Next

“As interest rates go more negative, market participants will have increasing incentives to make payments quickly and to receive payments in forms that can be collected slowly. This is exactly the opposite of what happened when short-term interest rates skyrocketed in the late 1970s: people then wanted to delay making payments as long as possible and to collect payments as quickly as possible…. if interest rates go negative, we may see an epochal outburst of socially unproductive—even if individually beneficial—financial innovation.”